Close to two-fifths of organizations now run private clouds in one form or another, and one-fourth are using public cloud services in an enterprise capacity.

Laurens ten Hagen's insight:

Private clouds are being extended deeper into the organizations that have them — a majority expect to be running most of their workloads in the cloud within the next 12 months, especially Platform as a Service middleware. In addition, close to one-third of public cloud users report they are employing hosted services to run their private clouds for them.

Realtime, a technology developed by a company which has been around since the Internet’s earliest days with the practically un-Googleable name “Internet Business Technologies,” has just received a massive $100 million investment to help fund its lofty plan to build the real-time web. The company offers a developer framework that now powers 2,000 real-time client applications, but, until now, it has only been available outside the U.S.

However, with the new investment from the three-month old, Såo Paulo-based BRZtech, a firm backed by private investors in Europe and South America, as well as Portuguese investment vehicle The Ongoing Group, Realtime is today launching its developer platform stateside.

“What can I do to be disruptive?,” CEO Andre Parreira asked himself years ago, when thinking about how he could scale his company internationally. “I looked to the Internet, and I saw that the Internet is based on a 30-year old protocol – it’s still request/response – so it’s static. It’s not delivering on the promise that the Internet will give us a true interactive experience,” he said. “So, let’s create the live web,” he thought.

That’s the goal with Realtime, which offers a freemium-based developer framework for building live web applications. However, to be clear, the funding isn’t just for the company itself – it’s also to fund the industry, including everything that would need to spring up around this “live web” ambition in order to make it a success. The company claims to have already signed up over 1,000 developers for its beta and plans further outreach through conferences, hackathons and other competitions.

Nope, no small dreams here. Just “a whole new era of the Internet,” as Parreira calls it.

Dropbox today announced some major changes to its Pro storage plans. The cross-platform data storage/sync solution is introducing huge upgrades for its Pro users. The service’s 50GB plan has been doubled to 100GB, and the 100GB plan has been doubled to 200GB for no extra charge. Pro users who already pay for one of those plans will be given the extra storage for free automatically. For those who want even more space on the cloud, a giant 500GB plan has also been announced.

Since time immemorial (2008), folks have been asking us for a bigger Dropbox. We’ve heard from architects with giant drafting files and photographers with huge portfolios, but mostly we hear from families who have more than 100 GB of photos, docs and videos. And now that Dropbox can automatically upload your photos from just about any camera or phone, everyone’s adding tons of photos and videos to Dropbox every day. As people add more stuff to Dropbox, we want to make sure they don’t have to worry about space.

Existing Pro users are also being given a three-month 100GB plan trial to share with friends or family. Businesses using Dropbox Teams now have a single centralized bill, free phone support, and 1TB of space out of the gate. All of the new plans and pricing go live on Dropbox’s website later today.

Als hij nog had geleefd was Alan Turing vandaag 100 geworden. Hij zei: ‘We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.’ De grondlegger van de informatica zou eens moeten zien, hoe hij het dagelijks leven van miljarden mensen beïnvloedt.

LinkedIn has updated its mobile app for the first time since 2011 and will run a small test of "sponsored content" i.e. ads in the stream.The test comes after LinkedIn announced a similar test of sponsored content in its iPad app in January. This would be the first time a LinkedIn phone app would sport the ads.Like other recent app updates, the update for iOS and Android has a heavy emphasis on photos. This makes the difference between the new app and the old one immediately apparent:

Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide. Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Based on an analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012, the best results are being attained by enterprises that focus on a very specific strategy and look to cloud-based technologies to accelerate their performance. Leading with a strategic framework of goals and objectives increases the probability of cloud-based platform success. Those enterprises that look to cloud platforms only for cost reduction miss out on their full potential.

Fueled by an accelerating move to cloud computing, and by a boom in associated telecommunications services, worldwide information technology spending is increasing somewhat faster than expected, according to industry analysts at Gartner.

Over all, people will spend $3.6 trillion on information technology in 2012, the research firm said. This represents a 3 percent increase from 2011, when $3.5 trillion was spent, Gartner said, and is up from the 2.5 percent increase projected three months ago.

The increase, while modest, is notable because it is happening in the face of a financial crisis in Europe, slow growth in the United States, and a slowdown in China’s economic growth.

Spending on public cloud services is expected to increase 20 percent, to $109 billion, from $91 billion in 2011. By 2016, Gartner said, this expenditure could nearly double, to $207 billion.

That would still be a relatively small portion of the total spending, though it tends to represent considerable computing power and potentially more efficient I.T. systems.

The greatest spending in the field, by far, remains telecommunications services. Gartner forecast that companies would spend $1.69 trillion on telecommunications this year, up only 1.4 percent from 2011. Fees for these services tend to be dropping, but Gartner cited increased demand from developing economies, as well as the rising demand generated by the boom in connected devices, like tablets and game consoles.

Gartner said over 200 business and technology analysts worldwide contributed to the report. These analysts also saw a 2.3 percent increase, to $864 billion, in fees for technology service. The consultants said consulting was in high demand, as companies try to manage things like their own complex systems, cloud computing, and the rise of analytics.

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